"Why not just slap another processor on the motherboard and call it a "GPU" instead?"
Theoretically, you could do that but you would need a mighty powerful CPU to achieve the level of performance of the GeForce since CPUs aren't optimized for graphics processing (note: GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit not Geometry Processing Unit as someone earlier posted.) The GeForce is a much more cost effective solution for graphics processing than getting another CPU.
According to Nvidia web page about the GPU, their technical definition of a GPU is:
"a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second."
The review of the GeForce 256 at Ace's Hardware has good info on comparing CPUs to GPUs. As another poster mentioned, graphics processing exists in a limited form in CPUs (3DNow!,etc.). Possibily in the future CPUs will integrate more advanced graphic processing functions. But, even if you had a CPU with complex graphic processing functions you still need some sort of display adapter. Personally, I think that it makes more sense to have the display adapter and graphics processing integrated on one unit.
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Theoretically, you could do that but you would need a mighty powerful CPU to achieve the level of performance of the GeForce since CPUs aren't optimized for graphics processing (note: GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit not Geometry Processing Unit as someone earlier posted.) The GeForce is a much more cost effective solution for graphics processing than getting another CPU.
According to Nvidia web page about the GPU, their technical definition of a GPU is:
"a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second."
The review of the GeForce 256 at Ace's Hardware has good info on comparing CPUs to GPUs. As another poster mentioned, graphics processing exists in a limited form in CPUs (3DNow!,etc.). Possibily in the future CPUs will integrate more advanced graphic processing functions. But, even if you had a CPU with complex graphic processing functions you still need some sort of display adapter. Personally, I think that it makes more sense to have the display adapter and graphics processing integrated on one unit.